Hillary: it's that fakir again...

There's a hoo-ha on about the putrid double-standard applicable to race humour when essayed by members of the Party of Treason, compared with the same words falling from GOP lips (as here and here). Nothing new there, then.

But naturally Hill's bizarre non-joke about Mohandas Gandhi (aka Mahatma Gandhi) [1] takes me to Winston Churchill's crack (which at least had a discernable point to it), mentioned in October 2002.

It is alarming and odious to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the vice-regal palace, while he is still conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.

There seems to be some dispute as to where they were spoken, though. The piece states

House of Commons. Feb 23, 1931

But this page of Canadian academic Hans Bakker says they were said at Epping (Churchill's then parliamentary constituency, to the east of London) [2].

...Gandhi was not merely a "half-naked fakir", as Winston Churchill described him (Speech at Epping, 23 February 1931). Instead, Gandhi was as much an English gentleman,-albeit one who wore a dhotti,-as a traditional Indian.

Churchill was clearly saying Gandhi was posing as a fakir, and was, in fact, no such thing! (A glance at the Table of Contents leads one to suspect the guy to be something of a Gandh-ophile.)